Despite a frenetic schedule of travel, lobbying and finding time to run his hugely popular cigar brand, Rocky Patel is never short of fun stuff. Trying to interview Patel at this year\u2019s InterTabac show in Dortmund, Germany, is like trying to herd cats.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s constantly waving to colleagues and passers by, being interrupted by fans, and on several occasions, friends and colleagues who seem to think his time is fair game at any moment for a catch up \u2013 whether mid interview or not.<\/p>\n
\u201cSorry about that,\u201d he says, not for the first time, as yet another passer by stops in for a chat. Rocky is a wanted man. Everyone wants a piece of him. And he manages to carry it off with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m still busy man,\u201d he says without a word of a lie. \u201cLots going on. In terms Cigar Rights of Europe? We think it\u2019s time to get a professional lobbyist on board. It\u2019s expensive, but we\u2019ve reached the stage where we need someone, who has ears of the right people, to be able to put across our point of view. There\u2019s only so much we can achieve on our own. This is the next step.\u201d<\/p>\n
As well as pushing cigar rights in both the US and Europe, Patel continues to launch new cigars and in particular push his opulent brand of cigar lounge. Burn by Rocky Patel has now opened in several locations across the US (Oklahoma City<\/a>, Pittsburgh<\/a>) and at InterTabac, scooped the Cigar Journal Trophy award for Best Lounge<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite a frenetic schedule of travel, lobbying and finding time to run his hugely popular cigar brand, Rocky Patel is never short of fun stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":9840,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[177,49,2808,44],"tags":[1915,4829,639,4693,3052],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24742"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cigarjournal.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}